1938 – The first televised FA Cup Final took place between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End

1939 – The 1939 New York World’s Fair opens.

1939 – RCA-owned NBC begins regularly scheduled television service from its New York station with the opening ceremonies of the 1939 New York World’s Fair broadcast.

1939 – Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the first President of the United States to appear on television during the World Fair’s opening ceremonies broadcast.

1943 – World War II: Operation Mincemeat – The submarine HMS Seraph surfaces in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain to deposit a dead man planted with false invasion plans and dressed as a British military intelligence officer.

1945 – Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for one day. Soviet soldiers raise the red flag over the Reichstag building.

1947 – In Nevada, the Boulder Dam is officially renamed Hoover Dam.

1948 – In Bogotá, Colombia, the Organization of American States is established.

1973 – Watergate Scandal: President Richard Nixon announces top White House aids H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and others have resigned.

1975 – Fall of Saigon: Communist forces gain control of Saigon. The Vietnam War formally ends with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnamese president Duong Van Minh.

1986 – Roger Clemens sets a major league baseball record with 20 strikeouts in nine innings against the Seattle Mariners.

1986 – Fire at the Central library of the City of Los Angeles Public Library, some 400,000 books and other items damaged or destroyed.

1991 – 1991 Bangladesh cyclone struck the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh with winds of around 155 mph, killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as 10 million homeless.

1992 – Riots in Los Angeles, California, follow the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 53 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.

1997 – The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 enters into force, outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons among its signatories.

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1192 – Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat (Conrad I), King of Jerusalem, in Tyre, two days after his title to the throne is confirmed by election. The killing is carried out by Hashshashin.

1253 – Nichiren, a Japanese Buddhist monk, propounds Nam Myoho Renge Kyo for the first time and declares it to be the essence of Buddhism, in effect founding Nichiren Buddhism.

1611 – Establishment of the Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas, The Catholic University of the Philippines, the oldest existing university in Asia and the largest Catholic university in the world.

1788 – Maryland becomes the seventh state to ratify the Constitution of the United States.

1789 – Mutiny on the HMS Bounty. Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.

1902 – Using the ISO 8601 standard Year Zero definition for the Gregorian calendar preceded by the Julian calendar, the one billionth minute since the start of January 1, Year Zero occurred at 10:40 AM on this date.

1920 – Azerbaijan is added to the Soviet Union.

1930 – The first night game in organized baseball history takes place in Independence, Kansas.

1932 – A vaccine for yellow fever is announced for use on humans.

1945 – Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance movement.

1947 – Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.

1950 – Bhumibol Adulyadej, got married with his queen, Queen Sirikit, after their quiet engagement in Lausanne, Switzerland on July 19, 1949.

1977 – The Red Army Faction trial ends, with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe found guilty of four counts of murder and more than 30 counts of attempted murder.

1977 – The Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure is signed.

1978 – President of Afghanistan Mohammed Daoud Khan is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by procommunist rebels.

1981 – Galician current Statute of Autonomy.

1986 – United States Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise becomes the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to transit the Suez Canal, navigating from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to relieve USS Coral Sea, on station across the “Line of Death” in the Gulf of Sidra off the coast of Libya. The transit began at 0300 and lasted 12 hours.

1987 – U.S. engineer Ben Linder is killed in an ambush by U.S.-funded Contras in northern Nicaragua.

1988 – Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle “C.B.” Lansing is blown out of Aloha Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane’s fuselage rips open in mid-flight.

1994 – Former Central Intelligence Agency official Aldrich Ames pleads guilty to giving U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia.

1961 – Sierra Leone is granted its independence from the United Kingdom, with Milton Margai as the first Prime Minister.

1967 – Expo 67 officially opens in Montreal, Canada with a large opening ceremony broadcast around the world. It opens to the public the next day.

1972 – Constructive Vote of No Confidence against German Chancellor Willy Brandt fails under obscure circumstances.

1974 – 10,000 march in Washington, D.C., calling for impeachment of US President Richard Nixon.

1977 – 28 people are killed in the Guatemala City air disaster.

1978 – Former Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman is released from an Arizona prison after serving 18 months for Watergate-related crimes.

1981 – Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.

1987 – The U.S. Justice Department bars the Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he had aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.

1992 – The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, is proclaimed.

1992 – Betty Boothroyd becomes the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

1992 – Russia and 12 other former Soviet republics win entry into the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

1993 – All members of the Zambia national football team lose their lives in a plane crash off Libreville, Gabon in route to Dakar, Senegal to play a 1994 FIFA World Cup qualifying match against Senegal.

1994 – South African general election, 1994: The first democratic general election in South Africa, in which black citizens could vote.

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1467 – The miraculous image of Our Lady of Good Counsel appears in Genazzano, Italy.

1478 – The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de’ Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence.

1607 – English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.

1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Regime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.

1805 – United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon.

1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.

1974 – Carnation Revolution: A leftist military coup in Portugal restores democracy after more than forty years as a corporate fascist state.

1975 – As North Vietnamese forces close in on the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy is closed and evacuated, almost ten years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam.

1981 – More than 100 workers are exposed to radiation during repairs of a nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Japan.

1982 – Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula per the Camp David Accords.

1983 – American schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.

1983 – Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto’s orbit.

1986 – Mswati III was crowned King of Swaziland, succeeding his father Sobhuza II.

1988 – In Israel, John Demjanuk is sentenced to death for war crimes committed in World War II.

1990 – The Hubble Telescope was deployed from Space Shuttle Discovery into orbit.

2005 – The final piece of the Obelisk of Axum is returned to Ethiopia after being stolen by the invading Italian army in 1937.

1965 – Civil war breaks out in the Dominican Republic Colonel Francisco Caamaño, overthrows the triumvirate that was in power since the coup d’état against Juan Bosch.

1967 – Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1, when the parachute fails to open. He was the first human to die during a space mission.

1967 – Vietnam War: American General William Westmoreland says in a news conference the enemy had “gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily.”

1968 – Mauritius becomes a member state of the United Nations.

1970 – The first Chinese satellite, Dong Fang Hong I, is launched.

1970 – The Gambia becomes a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, with Dawda Jawara as the first President.

1975 – The Baader-Meinhof Gang blow up the West German embassy in Stockholm.

1980 – Eight U.S. servicemen died in Operation Eagle Claw as they attempted to end the Iran hostage crisis.